Thursday, April 1, 2010

MOCA | 30 Works for 30 Years | Fred Tomaselli "Hang Over" (2005)

Fred Tomaselli creates collaged paintings from culled photographic reproductions and objects that he arranges on top of black grounds in kaleidoscopic compositions. Working on the floor, he organizes a work’s pictorial elements on a painted ground that he overlays with multiple thin coats of glossy clear resin, embedding them within the picture plane. Hang Over comprises hundreds of tiny leaves, pills, and images arranged in intricate patterns to depict the bucolic scene of a tree amid colorful flowers and tall grass. However, the work’s dense black background, as well as the dismembered hands and pills strewn about the tree branches like garlands, lend this seemingly utopian landscape an edgy quality, as if the setting for a dark fairytale.